Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

He picked up the envelope to study its exterior. His name hand printed on the outside. No return address.

Finally, he pushed his fingers into the small envelop until he pulled out a plum. An ordinary Post-it note. Its adhesive edge had clung to the bubble-pack lining the envelope.

Green rollerball ink slanted across the pink rectangular surface.

“Wear me!” Underlined.

He lifted the snake to the light. Well crafted, but weird.

Wear? How? Why?

As he stared at it, his blood slowed, then chilled. The room’s temperature hadn’t budged, but he felt as reptilian as a hibernating rattler himself.

This was a worm Ouroboros, all right, but it was also a ring.

The last ring he had worn had been the simple gold wedding band of a Catholic priest, a symbol of his commitment to celibacy, of his marriage to the Church. He hesitated, but he had to know: he jammed the ring onto a finger—the middle finger on his right hand.

It fit perfectly.

Wear me .

An order from…he knew who.

Drink me .

And Alice had shrunk.

Matt stared at Kitty O’Connor’s ring. At the order that came with it.

Wear me .

Or else.

And if he did, he’d shrink too.

Just like Alice.

He went to the bedroom to call Temple after all.

“You want Max?” she asked, incredulous, after two minutes of the usual banalities with which he had prefaced his request.

“I need to talk to him, or maybe vice versa. Can you ask him to get in touch with me?”

“Sure. I can ask.”

“That’s all that I ask.”

“There’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“I…had a good time in Chicago. Saw my mother.”

“Oh. I didn’t know you were gone.”

“Speaking engagement.” The word “engagement” suddenly took on a sinister new resonance. “Temple. Call him right away.”

“You got it.” She hesitated, didn’t want to say good-bye, wanted to ask a few questions. He didn’t want to answer any.

“Thanks,” he said quickly. “ ’Bye.”

It was ironic that he was rushing to hang up on Temple. Usually it was the other way around. A nasty thought had surfaced. Maybe his phone was tapped. He should have called Temple and made his unprecedented request from somewhere else.

Kitty O’Connor was the last person in the world he wanted to know that he was calling in Max Kinsella.

Matt tried to watch TV, then to listen to his new stereo. He went to the bedroom and looked for a book he hadn’t read before, or one he had and that he could count on to distract him.

Nothing worked.

The gold snake ring lay coiled on the otherwise empty gray cube table. All he needed was an apple to make an apropos still life. And maybe a naked woman. God knew there were a few in Las Vegas.

Probably his mother had been right. It was a godless town.

It takes a thief to catch a thief. To catch a stalker, did it take…Max Kinsella?

No. To catch a stalker, stalk the stalker’s past.

He ought to know that by now.

At 8:10 P.M., his doorbell rang.

Matt approached the coffered door with uncustomary caution.

When he opened it, Max Kinsella was leaning against the opposite wall, the illumination from Matt’s doorbell-level lamp uplighting his face into a Boris Karloff mask.

“I thought you’d call first.” Matt almost stuttered.

Max Kinsella, tall, dark, and all in black, including a long Western duster, on your doorstep was not a reassuring sight. Especially in eerie lamplight.

“I’m not a vampire.” His mocking, deep voice sounded very much like Bela Lugosi without the accent. “You don’t have to invite me in. But it would be nice.”

Matt stepped out into the small hall separating his unit from the building’s circling arterial hallway. He left the apartment door ajar.

“Maybe it’s better you turned up out here,” Matt said. “The place may be bugged. I thought of that after I called Temple.”

“Calling Temple seems to be a knee-jerk reaction with you.”

“It was the only way I knew to reach you.”

“Bugged. Curiouser and curiouser.” Kinsella pushed himself away from the wall in a motion as fluid as India ink. “Say nothing until I’m done.”

Matt let Kinsella precede him into the apartment, then sat on the red Kagan sofa that Temple had spied at a thrift shop and insisted he buy.

Spotting it stopped Kinsella cold, but then he moved to the bedroom, not making a sound.

Gumshoe, Matt thought, noticing his leather-soled shoes that resembled costly Italian loafers, but were probably a knockoff chosen for their quiet, downscale soles.

Kinsella was back in the main room like an apparition, passing through en route to the spare bedroom that Matt kept practically nothing in. Matt glimpsed an ebony ghost standing on a chair seat to check the ceiling light fixture.

Then Kinsella visited the kitchen and inspected all of the cupboards as well as the lighting fixtures. The living room, under and over everything, including behind light switch and electric plug outlet covers. The phone, of course, and all the electronic equipment Matt had so reluctantly purchased in the last couple of months.

Then the French doors to the patio, the patio, and back to the living room and bedroom for a second check.

It took thirty-five minutes.

When Kinsella came to sit on the Kagan sofa, he spoke at ordinary volume.

“A good thing you have such a spare design for living. Hard to bug. And no one has. Yet , I take it. You should check the phones, though, like I did, after I go, and every day. If you know what’s supposed to be in there, you recognize what isn’t. So what’s going on?”

“I wouldn’t have bothered you—”

“You have never bothered me.” Kinsella’s smile was so slight it was anorexic.

His face was angular and arresting, rather than handsome, but Matt guessed that women didn’t notice the difference.

“You wouldn’t call on me unless something was drastically wrong,” Kinsella went on. “What?”

Matt pointed to the snake ring.

Kinsella’s long, spidery fingers plucked it like a grape, then held it up to the light as if his fingertips were a bezel for a jewel.

“Good quality. Craftsman made. Perhaps not in this country. Not very valuable. A few hundred dollars maybe. The worm Ouroboros, of course. It symbolizes eternity.”

“Is that all?”

“Probably not. More would take research.” He held the ring toward Matt.

Matt couldn’t help it; he drew back as from a live snake.

“Speak,” said Kinsella, as if addressing a trained dog.

“I thought it came in the mail when I got back from out of town. But I dumped all the mail on that table.” He pointed to the matching cube still covered in unopened letters. “I now think this was ‘delivered’ earlier. When I was gone.”

“Someone surreptitiously entered your unit, that’s why you suspected bugging. But who? Who’d want to bug you?”

“An acquaintance of yours.”

Max’s gaze shifted to Matt’s midriff. “Kitty the Cutter. Temple does have a way with words, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, she does, and this Kitty woman is your auld acquaintance not-to-be-forgot, not mine. She’s…attached herself to me, I don’t know why, but she’s getting dangerous.”

“Not ‘getting,’ my lad. She always was.”

“Drop that phony brogue. This is not Ireland, north or south. This is not twenty years ago, and this is not my problem.”

“Why would Kitty O’Connor send you a worm Ouroboros?”

Matt picked up the Post-it note and handed it to Kinsella.

“Don’t you have tweezers?”

“No.”

“Pliers?”

“No.”

“Sugar tongs?”